Big Dreams, Big Plans, Small Money, No Commitment - How Not To Market in Asia III

Watching someone's dreams go up in smoke is never easy, especially in business. It makes you wonder why they were dreaming such things in the first place. This happens often, especially in developing markets. People dream things that are beyond their grasp, usually because they don't like the grasp they are already in. It was conveyed recently to me that all Vietnamese are controlled by somebody; a parent, a marriage partner, a business relationship and so in response to this relationship, they seek to control somebody else, a friend, a lover, a supplier - maybe employees - and in so doing this, seemingly release the pressure they are already feeling from the situation they are already in - and thus, compounding the situation they are already in. What you don't want to be is the last man on that totem pole, because when things go wrong, you or your company will be blamed for all of it, and used as the scapegoat for why the whole deal went sour in the first place.

I've seen it countless of times in Asia. From Korea to Vietnam to Singapore and China, so the syndrome is not just uniquely Vietnamese - it stems from the family business model that is so prevalent in all of Asia.

As many of you will recall, this series started with a patently ludicrous request from a client looking to bring in a blimp in to Vietnam for advertising purposes, just before the Miss Universe competition in Vietnam, last summer. Even before any plan had been written it didn't seem to have dawned on anyone that blimp shots of a beauty pageant were not a particularly saleable commodity. But I dutifully plodded through an 8 page checklist of questions for the client to ask the people who had purported said hot air, just to get the ball rolling - and then I asked for my standard fee. Ball stops rolling. Blimp implosion ensues.

Probably the quickest way to kill a bad deal is to ask for money up front, which means, to get all your expenses covered, before you even get on to the playing field. For even writing plans in Vietnam, that fee could be as little as $500 just for doing a basic proposal, to much, much more should you need to expend cash, or risk life and limb to enter the deal. I was recently told of a business deal involving the shipping of tons of wood to the United States. The business owner was now complaining that the shipping company was now holding them accountable for freight charges because the shipment had been declined by the purchaser in the US (Global financial crisis blamed for causing drop in furniture sales). "But wait a minute", said I, a man with an art degree, to the MBA close to the deal, "Shouldn't all expenses have been covered first in the contract", before anything was shipped? Of course they should have. Standard logistics company contracts require that all the money for a purchase of this nature be deposited in a secure account in the country of the purchaser and then released to the supplier upon customs clearance of the shipment. Essentially, the shipment docking pays the bill - thereby keeping skinflint buyers from balking in the middle of a deal. Looking just in a cursory fashion at someone who allowed this to happen, makes you wonder about all sorts of things.

The "How Not to Market in Asia" series continued with a story of a man who thought he had sold a TV show, but just needed me to write a demographic profile for him over the weekend to seal the deal. "What?" I asked myself. "This is a potential $20,000 initial pilot program and you think you've sold it but it lacks a demographic profile?" Bullshit. Having not been able to get any sort of plan or PowerPoint on the deal thus far, I simply asked for the $500 and the ball stopped rolling. Unfortunately I was barraged by a bizarre negotiation that went all the way down to $50 at one point and shots of me rolling around on the floor laughing during the protracted telephone conversations. I have no idea what ever happened to that deal but since it involved a bank sponsorship right at the media height of the global financial crisis, earlier this year, I suspect that nothing is the correct answer.

And so to the current meltdown. A deal this week, valued at just under $10,000 went south just because a $292 contingency cost couldn't be met? Bollocks. The basic plan was $1500 over budget before leaving the starting gate and had far more risk in it (99.9% for me) than $292 dollars. That small cost was just my red flag warning as to what might happen should things have gotten rolling to much further down the line. A fair call for avoiding possibly massive pain in the future.

I was once told to avoid at all cost, second generation Asians from seemingly wealthy families. Their parents worked hard, planted rice, ran green grocers, built buildings or whatever and then sold off the family fields or store to wealthy Taiwanese real estate developers or just socked it away, day by day dollar by dollar, making maybe millions. Then they sent their children to Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford or some other prestigious International university, thus producing offspring who have no idea at all of all the hard work it took to have made the money in the first place. So I've learned to watch out for this. When you see a person who's sending out all the outward signs of being well tended and well educated, look carefully and make sure they have the go-to spirit that made their parents so successful - or have they just learned to rely on others to do all the real work while they go on maintaining the face that is ever so important in these societies.

Hugh Macleod, in his book "Ignore Everybody" puts it this way "Put the hours in - Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort, and stamina. Stamina is utterly important. And stamina is only possible if it's managed well. People think all they need to do is endure one crazy, intense, job-free creative burst and their dreams will come true. They are wrong, they are stupidly wrong. Put the hours in, do it for long enough and magical, life-transforming things happen eventually." When evaluating any potential business deal with another party, simply ask yourself, "Yes, but are they willing to put in the hours like I do?" That will tell you more than any contract, budget, pedigreed degree or business plan ever will.

This week, with the help of a friend, I was able to get my book proposal to a more than relevant agent in New York. "A Rock Star" agent, as she was described to me. And what made the week for me, was that - not the idea that I might ever actually get to publish the thing, but that one more small link in the chain had been set in what might be the longest chain I have ever tried to assemble. I've done the work. I've publicized the work. I've put in the hours. And continue to do so with every letter I type on these pages. It all adds up, in little ways, sometimes.

A few weeks ago, the person with the ten thousand dollar deal had dismissed this blog and the Wild Wild East book as, not realistic - a long shot. And probably, from an outside reviewer's standpoint that's partially true. But you not only have to believe that long shots can happen - you have to put in the hours to make them happen. Dream real. And do the work. That's my Infinite Wisdom for today.

How Not To Market In Asia - The Importance of Time, Money, Quality and Knowing How Much of Each You Need to Succeed

Recently I had another request from yet another potential client to do something that didn't seem realistic within the time-frame and budget. You may remember a post I did last year regarding a different potential client who needed an entire business and advertising plan for bringing a blimp to Vietnam. In that case, I submitted a six page outline with essentially questions for the agency to ask the client so that we could begin to get a handle on whether it was a good idea for the client to proceed with his (pun intended) somewhat overblown idea. Suffice to say, no one has yet to see a blimp floating the skies of Vietnam as a giant Heineken bottle, condom or sausage company promotion. It never happened - and it never happened for one particularly very good reason. The client had absolutely no business plan - and wanted the agency, along with my assistance, to create one for free - stop wait, reverse that: He wanted us to actually pay for the privilege of planning and selling his media - a scenario I had seen already in Vietnam and documented in my "Pay to Pitch" post. Don't do it.

And so, having had this happen, at least once a quarter since I've been in Asia, I've decided that although I may not be the self-help business guru that many people may be looking for in this still wild wild east, I may be able to more than competently offer another kind of assistance. Aside from the successes I've enjoyed with British American Tobacco, Samsung LG and others, I may have learnt far more from the businesses I chose not to do business with - the broken startups, the never-been contenders, the people with no plan whatsoever or the companies who just simply had their heads up their asses - than the ones I have. There is indeed an art to choosing who not to work for, at least as much as there may be in deciding who to work for. Only after that, the not always easy choices of how much you are to be paid, and when and on what terms may progress.

And so with the combination of my successes, and avoidences of other, almost certain, failures, I have become an unequivocal expert on:

"How Not To Market In Asia".

To give you an idea of how I arrived at this writing premise, let me go through just a few of the details of this last week's scenario. For good sportsmanship, I'm not going to name any of the companies, specific programs or people involved, aside from myself, but I'll just give you a basic idea of the facts I had on hand:

I was contacted early last week by a gentleman who had found this blog, as well as my profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn. If you Google the words "Advertising", "Marketing", and "Vietnam" in a Boolean fashion, you'll more than likely hit me on page one, giving me a more than fair web presence in Vietnam - with credit given also to my significant postings on the previous subjects.

The gentleman proceeded to ask a number of questions related to my business via Google chat and I directed him to my LinkedIn profile to get a handle on my previous experiences. After another day or so of chat inquiries I deduced that he was looking for someone to do sales work on a commission basis. He had a TV show with a sponsorship package he wanted to sell to a large foreign bank in town, and assured me that the sale was almost closed - save for the fact that the bank had questioned his company's lack of "Demographic Profile" for their show - which he needed in less than a week. I was immediately taken aback. How do you get to almost closing a deal on sponsorship of a TV program without a Demographic Profile of your product? It's almost slide #1 in your Powerpoint intro, isn't it? Apparently it wasn't. My immediate feeling was that if they had missed this, that their pitch probably had quite a few more holes - and that basically, they were a long way from selling anything.

I looked at the company's website, read the show description, watched the demo and read the bios of all of the Directors of the company. The project, as it exists on the Internet looked good by local standards, but that's a far cry from getting a bank director, in these currently murky financial waters, to sign off on what I was told was a US $20,000 sponsorship deal - and with the Demographic Profile being the only thing standing in the way? I didn't see it.

After more and more questions and fewer and fewer answers - hours worth - over the Internet and phone, it was obvious, that I could no more guarantee a sale based on only one small part of the plan, no matter what I wrote, than I could pull rabbits out of hats or coerce Genies out of bottles. Quite simply, I felt there was far more work in the job than the gentleman was claiming. And convincing him of that, was not going to be easy. It was time to cut to the chase.

I made it abundantly clear that I worked on a fee only basis and was not interested in any sort of success based pay structure. How could I be confident of any success when I was only being asked to fill one hole in a dike that was obviously full of them, and on very short notice? We then began the dance that begins all negotiations and that's pretty much where the whole deal hit the wall. This company simply had no money, or from the numbers bandied about, reasonably less than would excite the profit motives of a convenience store clerk in Toronto - and they were rapidly running out of time. I turned the work down and hung up my phone.

Over the weekend, I sent the man a mail that more fully explained why I had turned down the work. I explained that in every job there are the three elements of Time, Quality and Money. Each of us are allowed to choose two. If you have no money, time may buy you quality. If you have no quality, money and time could produce that, but not always. But if you have no time, only money and quality can get you where you need to be. This man was running out of both time and money. There was now, truly nothing I could do to help him unless we could come to some sort of budget.

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The next few days, leading up to his deadline were almost humourous. Various messages on my phone and Google chats claiming things like "marketing is easy" and "I'm going to start my own marketing company" and such, letting me know that he was doing the work himself.

Here is the final message about his client meeting:

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me:.........You close your deal?
client:......yes we got some closure
me:.........what does "some" mean?
.............."closing" a deal means getting a contract on paper...

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End of conversation. I've not heard anything from him since. Why do I think he did not get his deal signed and will probably be crossing "T"s and dotting "I"s for quite some time? With no ill feelings towards this guy or his company (it's only business, right?), our introductory work together pretty much told me that we wouldn't be doing any more work together in the future. And it's not totally about the money. In the end it became about respect. He didn't respect my (or anyone else in my position's) participation in the process enough to allow enough time or money to get the job done properly in the first place, and then in the end, when he was out of time, decided to declare he could do it better himself.

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That's not a decision I will ever make. #1, because I am neither a financial guru, nor a TV producer and #2, because I have a tremendous amount of respect for those who do what I do not - and do it extremely well. So the moral to this entire story, if there is a moral to be expected, is this:

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Understand what it is that you do better than anybody else - and - stick to your guns.

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If you can do both of these things, you'll be about 8 million miles ahead of the other guys, gals or companies who are all trying to do something similar to whatever it is that you are doing. If you can do both of those things you will not be wasting time doing a lot of other things that you should have other people doing. If you can do both of those things, you will have mastered the art of picking your battles and be spending your time doing whatever it is that you really love.

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"The more steps you take to avoid failure, the fewer you will need to achieve success."

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This week, I turned down a job, because it was not a job that was going to ever be a good job in the future. If so many of the marketers in Asia, be they agencies or other, could do that, they'd be a lot further along the curve. I end today's post with item #15 from Hugh MacLeod's upcoming book "Ignore Everybody - How to be creative". "The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not." Hugh is also responsible for the cartoon that begins this post.

For more information on Brand Marketing Training in Vietnam, go here.

For more in the "How Not To Market In Asia" series, click below:

II) What's Wrong With the Vietnam Advertising Association?

III) Detri-viral Marketing: When Web 2.0 works against your brand

Pay to Pitch?

I don't know if this is strictly a Vietnamese phenomenon or is happening in other countries but listen to the tale and then, someone, let me know.

The client here is S-Fone, a not-so-large Vietnam mobile service and the story is that they asked five or so agencies to pitch for their account and then asked the agencies to "pay" to pitch for the media. The value of the media portion of the business is 3 million US. Hot a shabby amount around here.

DDB ended up in a two-way battle for creative only against Ogilvy and emerged victorious on the creative assignment but declined to participate and pay to be included in the media portion.

You can read the whole strange tale here on Brand Republic.


Shit. Is this some bizarre wave of the future or just a Vietnamese thing? Or could it be Korean? S-Fone is affiliated with SK Telecom in Korea so I wonder. But, in any case this brings me back to my blimp experience.



The client was the blimp owner and was asking an agency to pay to write a plan and then have exclusive rights to sell advertising on the blimp and the agency was in-turn asking me to write this entire plan, uhh, for free.

Both Ogilvy and DDB walked on the pay portion of the pitch and I, of course, opted not to write any plans for free on blimps. There's a whole lotta hot air being passed around here these days. I'm glad I walked on the blimp instead of being taken for a ride.

I work for myself. Who do you work for?

The subjects of work and economy have been issues of considerable conversation recently, both with people I know here in Vietnam and my email friends back in the US and UK. Inflation rates globally are at 7% with over 4% in the US and UK and 20% here in Vietnam – and salaries are not keeping pace, anywhere – there is truly no place to run. China's not the answer that's for sure. Just read The New York Times story on the problems with construction of the Olympic facilities and realize the headaches of the international architects and low commissions they've accepted – yes, arguably, to build some of the finest examples of contemporary architecture this century has yet to offer – because the opportunity and low labor costs make comparable buildings impossibly unfeasible in any developed economy. Nobody's making any money in China right now but they are just working because that's where the work is. And that beats not working at all.

In Vietnam things are no different. For all the massive construction projects and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) it's hard to see the trickle-down theory in practice aside from providing plenty of jobs for labourers. Conversely milk has gone from 12,000 dong to 18,000 in just six months, affecting every mother in the country, and my rent jumped by 20% in March. As far as employment, things seem to be treading in reverse as well. I spent an hour last Monday at the largest headhunter in Vietnam and was told that only possibly three jobs at my level were placed in the last two years. Honestly, I don't think this person had ever placed an experienced marketing person before – or knew what to do with one. An hour later at Ho Chi Minh Economic University the interviewer just looked at my CV and had a similar reaction – as if there were an elephant in the office and the main job was to figure out how to get rid of it. In terms of marketing, Vietnam has just no history and doesn't understand the values of marketing, branding or advertising. Even the universities have just recently started adding classes. (You can learn about a new "Institute" for advertising here, partially supported by the Vietnamese Advertising Association). What tends to happen currently is that clients come in, demand certain things and the agencies have only the capability of working in a reactionary fashion. There don't seem to be any concepts of pro-activity or market analysis or planning. What history there will be is currently being written. Do you think there might be some work there? I do.

So for my entire time in Vietnam I've focused mainly on client direct work. I supplement that with teaching jobs to pay the rent but just have much more fun and challenge with the mazes and creative metrics of marketing. The challenge then becomes deciding which deals one should take and which deals one should avoid. I read recently a story in Ad Age about "How To Avoid Working For A Jerk" and that really drove home the point:

"Who do I work for?", I asked myself and the answer was oh, so very clear.
"I work for myself", I answered. And I realized that that has always been the case. From my first full-time employment at my first agency after university up through today, my ultimate responsibility has always been to myself. If I don't like the way the boss treats me, or have issues with company policies, it is truly up to me to make the necessary changes – either by employing creative disobedience in relation to inane company or client directives, or by finding other, better work. It is really that simple.

The blimp job this year was a prime example – "Blimps Go Boom". This particular client had an idea to bring a blimp into Vietnam on which to sell advertising space but they had no business plan whatsoever. I gave them a fee for writing that plan, and a good solid outline, and that became the end of that job. If a client doesn't want to pay for planning then it's a good bet you're never going to find a way to get paid for anything.

A few weeks after that I was contacted by an educational service on behalf of an Australian university. The job was 13 weeks at five hours a week but included 3 student evaluations of my performance, 2 from admin by the local service and one by the university, all over the course of thirteen weeks. That's an an evaluation every two weeks! A review of the evaluation criteria and contract revealed that it was essentially designed to provide a plethora of loopholes for the institution to claim the work I was doing was "not good" as was the language in the contract. Schools in Vietnam are notorious for structuring programs that are based on what the students enjoy and not necessarily what needs to be taught because they want to maintain the highest possible enrollment and hence profit. So in escense, students are allowed to vote for their teachers. Translation? If you want students to be happy, make it as easy as possible. But this is simply not possible in a number of marketing and business disciplines. Teaching Philip Kotler's "Principles of Marketing" is no easy course for western kids and becomes doubly difficult when you realize they won't be familiar with half the case study companies and have a significant language barrier added in. So I passed on that opportunity. One clause in the contract stated quite clearly that the school "reserved the right to give the professor three days notice" and release him/her if the performance was deemed "not good". That was probably the biggest red flag in the whole deal.

Next up and finally, was the Japanese internet company that wanted me to provide three 200 word stories per week on marketing trends in Vietnam for an industry audience. Now that's slightly easier than sneaking a blimp into the country but bears it's own hurdles and challenges. It really all comes down to price. Information in Vietnam is not only hard to come by because of the language difference but also because very little is published. The hidden research quotient in this job was about as large as that blimp – but undeterred by a little hard work I carried on a six week discussion with the Japanese company in search of a workable agreement. To give you an idea of writer's rates for this kind of work the Writer's Market gives a good overall breakdown for everything from advertising writing to various journalistic rates including trade journals. Their average rate for trade journal columns is 78 cents per word with a high of $1.25 and a low of 58 cents. Further checking with a writer friend here who has reported for a Hong Kong trade journal revealed that 45 cents per word would be an acceptable rate in Vietnam. The Japanese offer was 15 cents per word – pretty much a huge red flag and a no-go on that deal. I should put them in touch with the blimp people. They could start a business together! Neither one seems to have any money.

The whole point of this is that the one advantage that each of us has over potentially asshole-ish people and bad deals is choice. We get to choose what we do for a living. As the old story goes about the patient who complained to the doctor that "his feet hurt when he jumped up and down" , the doctors response was just blindly logical. "Then stop jumping up and down.", he told the patient.

We all have the ability to stop jumping up and down if that is what is causing us pain. And I don't suggest that we should be lazy or stop working but do suggest that we be more selective in the work we choose to do and make sure that Quality of Life is appropriately accounted for in our negotiations with employers and clients. We don't have to take a bad deal if we can smell it up front. The trick then becomes in our olfactory senses towards business. And that is what I find myself doing more and more of these days; deciding which jobs not to take.

And so my life is blimp-less and Yen-less but not necessarily less in terms of what I am prepared to do for my future. There's an old salesmen's adage that fit's well here –

"Every time a customer turns me away I say Thank You. Thank you for putting me one step closer to a sale."

Once we accept the fact that we are our own ultimate boss, it becomes a lot easier to bear the obstacles that will inevitably come along.

For some more interesting reading on this subject, take a look at this essay from Paul Graham entitled, "You Weren't Meant To Have A Boss".

Blimps and Bullshit: Am I Doing Enough? II

Monday, March 16, 2008
A one-day diary:

9:00 am
I don't wake so early most days. If I have a business meeting or early appointment I will, but generally I work until 2am or later so seven hours sleep is good. I work often on less but find, that a bit more sleep makes me more productive and happy.
9:05 am
Rice. Coffee. Rubber. Those are Vietnam's three largest exports in that order. My morning coffee is made with a single-drip container that sits atop your standard cup. Hot water poured through, a rounded tablespoon makes a splendid cafe with about an 8th of an inch sweetened condensed milk in the bottom. A gentle stir with a tiny spoon and I'm ready to go. 100 grams of Arabica lasts me a week and costs around 50 cents.
9:15 am
Coffee and first cigarette in hand it's a mere swing and roll over to the charmingly antique (2003) Powerbook G4 12". General email and such. "There Will Be Blood" has finished downloading. Now I've got a movie for the evening.
9:20 am
Phone rings. Land-line. Something's wrong with the cell-phone and I'm off to the MobiFone shop to see if they can sort it out today. On the land-line is Crispin. He's invited me for breakfast. Crispin and I met two summers ago when we both DJ'd on different nights at the same club. I on a Monday and Crispin on a Wednesday, we became fast friends being fans of Britpop, psychedelic, Eric Satie, Broadway show tunes, Sinatra, Trip-hop, Hip-hop and alternative music of uncommon variety in Saigon. Crispin is visiting from England to which he has returned to pursue a career in the "real world".
9:30 am
Ye olde shit, shower and shave and I'm off for an Irish breakfast.
9:50 am
Crispin meets me in the lobby of my building and we jump on his motorbike to one of the local cheap-eats breakfast places.
10:00 am
The "All-day Irish Breakfast" is Vietnam's friend to hangovers from all over the world. Served on a 16" plate, not a spot of porcelain is visible amidst the pile of food served. Two eggs – poached, four slices of bread – toasted with butter on the side, two hash browns, four sausages, 4 strips of bacon, baked beans – helped by a dash if Tabasco and two slices of fried tomato. Cost: around 5 dollars with coffee. Tasty and filling.
10:30 am
Crispin and I discuss all things Vietnam, England and America. We talk about this blog and about Crispin's plan to work in the university system in the UK helping Asian students with their educations in an administrative function. He's visiting his girlfriend and really does miss Vietnam. He is experiencing the kind of post-traumatic-stress disorder that follows many expats back to their home countries after having been away for awhile and having realized that the "stress" was actually their home country. Being away from it for long enough can mellow a person out so much that they never truly recover to a land that doesn't allow smoking, excess drinking, street corner marijuana sales, naked girls playing pool with you or felatio being delivered at your barstool. Of course, that's not the life that everyone lives, but it is possible, and purchasable if one desires. What's the bigger idea is that there are simple freedoms that can be had, well beyond sex and drugs in this categorically communist country that can not be had in many democracies. So what, they don't really vote for their leaders? We do and look what we got last time. Anyway, just a perspective you won't see in Boise. Or SoHo. I suggest to Crispin that he start a blog – to channel his thoughts.
11:30 am
Crispin and I bid farewell, vow to keep in touch over the web and off we go. He on his motorbike and I on a short walk back home. Need to burn a few calories off.
11:45 am
From 11:30 to at least 1:30 everyday, Vietnam shuts down. It's a bit like a siesta and a holdover from the colonial days of no air-con or international clients to tend to. Switchboards turn off, air-con goes down and people flee the office buildings to the cafes, street restaurants or maybe home for a nap. You'll even find rows of office workers sleeping on the floors of darkened rooms once they've had their fill of "pho" (noodle soup) and maybe a little "kem" (ice cream) on a particularly hot day. It's pointless to try to get anything done in Vietnam during this time. So just don't try. I'm quite sure that Bentley dealership is closed.
12:00 noon
And so it's back home for a little computer geeking. An email to a client, some work filling out the calendar and an hour goes fast.
1:30 pm
Off to sort out that pesky phone issue. A few weeks back in a post titled Perspective II I had made note that I had not had the best of days. Because on that day, on my way home from working, my cell-phone was pick-pocketed. She was a crusty old whore and one I wanted nothing to do with. I could see her silhouette in the shadows of the car dealership now closed on a deserted stretch of a block or so of my route but tried not to notice. The Vietnamese are perplexed by my insistence on walking almost everywhere but I prefer it. I see a lot more of life by walking and keep a trim figure in the bargain. I politely refused her offer of "massage baby" twice and tried not to make eye contact but on the third approach one trained hand went for my crotch and the other for my left pants pocket. My pulling away was not enough to keep the phone from joining its new owner. Stealing phones is an international pastime in Southeast Asia – almost a legitimate job. So it became another week or so of replacing the phone and getting a new sim card to make it work. But today was to find out why the new sim card wasn't working.
2:00 pm
MobiFone bustles with customers, paying bills, opening new accounts and fixing old ones. A machine gives you a number and then you wait. Usually 20 minutes max. There are a few advertising posters on the wall but it's best to have a book or magazine. It took just minutes for my attendant to figure out what was wrong. I had only paid the bill that morning and the new sim card had been "inactive" until then. It worked now.
2:30 pm
Another short walk to a client meeting at three. Saigon is charming downtown. The French built cathedral Notre Dame and the Gustav Eiffel designed post office were on my way.
3:00 pm
Meeting with a client and a request for proposal. Job? They've got a contract to bring a blimp, a derigible, a zeppelin, into the country and want to use it for advertising purposes. They want me to write a plan that covers all of the blimp's advertising plans, expenses, potential media consumers, schedules and fees. I don't know fuck all about blimps but I'm gonna learn fast. Now this is the point where I pinch myself just to make sure I'm still on an oxygen breathing planet. How much fucking fun is this? I'm gonna get paid for figuring out how to sell blimp advertising to the Vietnamese. Never been done. No background information. Need to write this one from the ground up. Shit, bad pun. But it's just this sort of thing that makes my life fun here. No, I won't be going to L.A. to shoot any million dollar commercials but I might get to ride in a blimp over Vietnam. This place is just fucking nuts.
4:00 pm
A city bus to my next appointment. At rush hour it's best not to be a pedestrian around here. The buzz of motorbikes is just deafening and without a steel enclosure around you, you're just a walking target.
4:30 pm
Cafe Sua Da, means "iced coffee". Within every city block there must be at least three old ladies who will make you a glass of the stuff. The coffee, made presumably that morning, is poured, syrup-like, from an old liter and a half Pepsi bottle. The ice, crushed by hand from a chiseled block and beaten into half inch chunks with a small wooden bat and a towel. And the whole treat topped off by maybe a quarter inch of sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of the glass. Cost: about 30 cents. Taste: With a cigarette? Priceless.
5:15 pm
The way many people make a steady buck around here is by teaching. And in the marketing business there's a huge clientele in corporations, private institutions and universities. I've worked for them all. My 5:15s are college students who speak well enough but are painfully shy. Oh, I'll bust them of that over time.
6:00 pm
Knock on the classroom door and it's one of the administrators. She wants to know if I can fill in for another teacher at another location at 7:30. No problem. A few more hours on my bill.
7:15 pm
Off to the substitute job.
7:30 pm
Before my class I'm asked if I can do an evaluation on a new student. After a 20 second check of her speaking ability (excellent) I run through our evaluation criteria. She answers all the questions easily on our highest level class. Probably she won't be my student but I hope she doesn't get bored. It's odd. Those who truly need an education don't seek it out and those who don't really need it keep getting more.
9:30 pm
A 30 minute walk home should wash the work out of me. I'm thinking more now about blimps. Jeezuz. Now I'm a blimp salesman.
10:00 pm
I'm not halfway up the five storey walkup that is my flat when the cel-phone rings. It's Ryan, a 26 year old American computer and music geek who likes to come to my place, have a few beers and participate in some of the local sharecropping that goes on from time to time. He wants to know if William, another friend of mine, wants to play some guitar tonight. Fuck, I'm bushed. I enter my flat and within five minutes there's a knock on the door. It's William, guitar in hand. Looks like the jam session's at my place tonight. We all merry about for a couple of hours and have a nice time. Ryan can write and William can play. William and I go all the way back to Korea. We met whilst hanging around at the open-mic nights in town. It's good to have friends in the music business.
12:00 am
Those guys kicked out, it's time to check that torrent I downloaded of "There Will Be Blood". Awesome.

Blimps, tomorrow.

For more in the "Am I doing enough?" series, check below:

III An Ozomatli Day: Am I doing enough? III
II Blimps & bullshit: Am I doing enough? II
I "I've spent many years making up for not being a genius": Am I doing enough?